the whole class to which it belongs; but as the years
increase, this becomes less and less the case. That is the reason why
youthful impressions are so different from those of old age. And that
it also why the slight knowledge and experience gained in childhood
and youth afterwards come to stand as the permanent rubric, or
heading, for all the knowledge acquired in later life,--those early
forms of knowledge passing into categories, as it were, under which
the results of subsequent experience are classified; though a clear
consciousness of what is being done, does not always attend upon the
process.

In this way the earliest years of a man's life lay the foundation of
his view of the world, whether it be shallow or deep; and although
this view may be extended and perfected later on, it is not materially
altered. It is an effect of this purely objective and therefore
poetical view of the world,--essential to the period of childhood
and promoted by the as yet undeveloped state of the volitional
energy--that, as children, we are concerned much more with the
acquisition of pure knowledge than with exercising the power of will.
Hence that grave, fixed look observable in so many children, of which
Raphael makes such a happy use in his depiction of cherubs, especially
in the picture of the _Sistine Madonna_. The years of childhood are
thus rendered so full of bliss that the memory of them is always
coupled with longing and regret.

While we thus eagerly apply ourselves to learning the outward aspect
of things, as the primitive method of understanding the objects about
us, education aims at instilling into us _ideas_. But ideas furnish no
information as to the real and essential nature of objects, which, as
the foundation and true content of all knowledge, can be reached only
by the process called _intuition_. This is a kind of knowledge which
can in no wise be instilled into us from without; we must arrive at it
by and for ourselves.

Hence a man's intellectual as well as his moral qualities proceed
from the depths of his own nature, and are not the result of external
influences; and no educational scheme--of Pestalozzi, or of any one
else--can turn a born simpleton into a man of sense. The thing is
impossible! He was born a simpleton, and a simpleton he will die.

It is the depth and intensity of this early intuitive knowledge of the
external world that explain why the experiences of childhood take such
a firm hold on t